Brent smiled—almost laughed—when he turned and saw Jeremiah, still in his underwear, with the headgear on and controller at the ready.
“Practicing?” he asked.
“Yeah, well, I’m sick and tired of you whipping my ass every single time we play this stupid thing.” He switched the system off, discarded his gear and went to the kitchen to make coffee. He’d wait until they were actually in battle before introducing Brent to Clyde. He wanted more practice, too. It wouldn’t matter how fierce his avatar looked if he kept shooting himself in the foot.
“Yeah, well, I’ve been practicing, too,” Brent said. “Still gonna whip your ass. Every single time.”
Chapter 15
Day 89
“Why do you get so bent out of shape when your wife works late?” Brent was attempting egg-white omelets for a late lunch. “I mean, Mel’s out three or four nights a week, either working or out somewhere with her girlfriends. Doesn’t faze me. She was out last night until all hours.”
“It’s different when you’re married,” Jeremiah told him. “Especially when you have a kid. And it doesn’t help that I can’t even ask her about it.”
Jeremiah got up from the table and grabbed the orange juice from the fridge. They had a viewing scheduled for four o’clock and they still had almost an hour to kill. He was glad for the chance to get out of his own head for a while, so he didn’t mind that Brent had decided to tread on what he considered personal territory.
“I don’t know,” Brent told him. “I just can’t imagine me and Mel ever being that way, not even when we’re married. I guess I just think two people don’t necessarily need to be together every minute to be together.”
“Like I said, it’s all different when you’re married. You’ll see. We have an arrangement—I work, and she takes care of the family side. When she starts missing that, it’s like she’s not holding up her end of the deal.”
“But she’s working, too, right?”
“It was supposed to be a part-time job,” he said. “You know, just something to keep her head in the game. And I make enough money. She doesn’t have to work.”
“Still,” Brent said, shaking his head, “seems you’re mad over nothing. I’m not going to be like that with Mel. I don’t care what you say.”
“You have any pictures of Mel?” Brent talked about her so often, working her into every other conversation, that Jeremiah felt he needed some point of reference.
Brent took out his phone, fingered the screen deftly and handed it to Jeremiah with a grin.
She was every bit as beautiful as Brent had built her up to be. Long waves of caramel-colored hair fell around light brown eyes and bright pink lipstick. She had four earrings in her left ear and the photo caught her in midlaugh so that even her personality seemed perfectly captured in still life—vibrant and confident and totally sure of her place in the world. She looked like the sort of person everyone else gravitated to in a crowded room. He could practically hear her laugh.
“How the hell did you land her?” he asked, handing the phone back. “You got some secret trust fund or something?”
“Nope,” he said, waving his hands down the length of his body, “just all this awesomeness.”
“Yeah, right. How did you meet? And don’t say the strip club she worked at, because that would just be sad.”
“No, we met through a mutual friend,” he said. “And she wasn’t a stripper, she was an exotic dancer, and she only did it to put herself through school. That isn’t sleazy, it’s a good work ethic.”
“And where did she go to school?”
“She studied art history at Suffolk,” he said. “She’s an artist in her own right, though, and damn good.” He nodded toward the abstract painting on the wall. “She painted that, you know.”
“You’re kidding.” Jeremiah was glad he’d never thought to mention to Brent that he didn’t like the painting.
“No, Charles Scott commissioned it himself when the place was being decorated. She’s incredibly talented.”
Jeremiah had trouble imagining that Charles Scott would concern himself with something as trivial as the lab’s decor.
“Is all of her stuff abstract like that? You think you might be able to get her to paint something else for me? Like maybe a portrait of my dog or something?”
“Well, I can’t do it now,” Brent told him. “I’m not allowed to talk about you. It’s in my contract. But afterward, I guess, when this is all over, I could ask her. Why the dog, though? I thought you didn’t like that dog.”
“N-no,” Jeremiah stammered. “No, of course I like him. Why would you say that?”
“He doesn’t seem to like you much.”
Jeremiah swallowed hard. He hadn’t meant to say so much.
“Well, he’s really Parker’s dog,” he said. “I thought a painting might make a great gift for Parker when I get back.”
“Sure, I’ll see what I can do.”
“So, does Mel just sit and paint all day? She makes enough money with that?”
“At the moment, she’s working as an assistant in the press department of the MFA,” he said. “But she does okay with her painting. She’s had a few shows.”
“In my day, nerds like you didn’t get girls like her.”
“I think we just sort of complement each other,” Brent said. “Left brain, right brain sort of thing, science and art.”
“Seems like the two things are mutually exclusive,” Jeremiah said, more to himself than to Brent.
“Nah, it’s like a balance. You need a little of everything in you, you know? And if you don’t have it, you gravitate to someone else who does. Opposites attract, right?”
On some level, Jeremiah could understand that. When he’d met Diana all those years ago at college, it was her eccentricity and her absolute dread of the mundane that had drawn him in.
